Why are you picking on this Hooper kid? After all, isn't he just a little fish in a big industry where integrity has fled the room. The days of Edward Murrow are gone, journalism has settled into corporate America where spin = sales = revenue.

I look forward to your illustrious sheriffs up coming best seller, How I Kicked the Habit and Kept my Badge. Make sure to Tivo the Oprah episode!!

Vamos a hablar pinchi cabron. Si no sabes como hablar, callete!

You are going to have to do better then grammer school spanish if you want to play.

“Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.” - Plato

Besa mi culo, puto.

Besto, Michael!

what the heck is your obsession with the sheriff? Did he give you a parking ticket? It gets boring to read over and over again that you are pissed.

And by the way: Why do I have to give you my email address (register) to post in your blog. You were furious about data mining when the republicans did that.

M. Smith

Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein

Keep the faith and keep up the good work.

With Pultizers in tow,
We shall conquer Aspen city,
And blog with all our might,
And try say things witty.

We shall pontificate and proliferate,
In a style suitable to the masses,
We will write just about anything,
So long as we get free passes.

Best, Michael!

So this is what Aspen Post is all about: it’s an open mike, even if you can’t resist the opportunity to knock the founder of this blog by making believe you are him. But I am also struck by the way that some of the harshest critics assume the cloak of anonymity (excepting MC 666 above, who made it pay.) Aspen Post lets you hide and play peek-a-boo, but if you really believe in what you say then put yourself out there, like the bloggers here do.

To be anonymous is to permanently accept the status of eunuch in cyberspace. You know who you are.

But I did want to address my cloak-and-dagger critics. The kvetching falls into several categories: that I’m fat; that I have a huge ego; and that I’m a lousy journalist.

Fat: guilty as charged!

Ego: guilty again!

Lousy journalist: maybe not so much.

I didn’t just land here from outer space, journalistically speaking. Before I took the job at the Aspen Daily News, I came in second for the job of Managing Editor of Yahoo! when I was told repeatedly by Yahoo!’s editor-in-chief that I was “overqualified.” (I’m not kidding.) I spent a month trying to convince her I couldn’t possibly be overqualified for the M.E. job, that it was a “destination” position, the job of a lifetime, and so on. (She was afraid I’d get bored!) No luck, but perhaps an indication that I had something on the ball not obvious to my print-bound peers here in Aspen.

I’d been around the block and back long before I came to the valley. I’ve worked at three major metropolitan newspapers (San Francisco, Baltimore, Boston); I’ve started three independent news services; as the lead consultant, I developed Citicorp Global Report, the first international online service, and helped to formulate Reuters TV 2000 for the global news service based in London; I was the founder and executive producer of Nutrition.com; the executive producer of the first interactive sports arena system in the country at MCI Center; and the founder and executive producer of Women’s Sports Channel, then the primary provider of online sports news for Oprah’s Oxygen network. I was also the executive producer of a wireless sports news service that went head-to-head with USA Today and MSNBC: we put a whupping on them by a ratio of 8-1.

I have also been a syndicated media and television columnist in Boston; the new media columnist for Editor & Publisher, the Bible of the newspaper industry; and the organizer of an Interactive Newspapers conference attended by over 800 people. I wrote a cover story about the first Nike cross-trainer for the start-up Hippocrates magazine (now In Health) the year it won the National Magazine Award; earlier this year I was Aspen Editor of New West when it won the Online Journalism Award for General Excellence. As a freelance writer I’ve written for a whole bunch of publications, including the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, Hartford Courant, Rocky Mountain News, and the San Francisco Examiner, where I first started as a copy boy during the strange case of Patty Hearst.

At Harvard, I was a grant award winner at the JFK School of Government for my thesis on my father, a newspaperman who won the Pulitzer Prize. My grandfather was also in the news business, and ran the Associated Press wire in Danbury, Connecticut. I taught writing at Harvard and served there as the first-ever Journalism Tutor at Eliot House. I was in the first-class to attend the Television Institute at the Columbia School of Journalism. I’ve also had a dozen short stories published and was the Raymond Sokolov Scholar in Fiction at the Breadloaf Writers Conference.

One other thing I’m particularly proud of: I founded Aspen Post, Skiing Post, and more Posts to come.

I suppose all of this proves I have an ego, but I’ve already pleaded guilty to that. And I’m fat as charged. But as a journalist I’ve paid my dues. You could look it up.

One last clarification: I was fired from the Daily News though they were nice enough to let me resign. It’s certainly not a secret, and I’ll let my critics draw their own conclusions. But it’s worth a quick anecdote about the last time I was fired, over 25 years ago, in 1981 in New York at Link Resources, because I had brought the company online. I was ashamed of being fired for years, but then one day I realized it was pretty cool to be fired for bringing your company online way back in 1981. I was proud enough of being fired to put it on my resume, where it stays to this day.

Cheers,

Michael Conniff
(accept no substitutes)

Best, Michael!

Man I love this town!! Too bad Bill O'Reilly would never be able to host his show from here. No spin zone??Doesn't exist in the ol Ute City.

In fact, it's pretty funny that you were just about the only one in town who didn't know Braudis' whereabouts. I wonder - did you do anything more than call the Sheriff's office and ask where he was? You couldn't get one person to go on the record. In fact, I can't recall any of your "breaking news" stories where ANYONE has ever gone on the record. In another story you couldn't even get the news guy at your own radio station to go on the record. It couldn't possibly be because no one takes you seriously or respects your skills as a writer or journalist, could it?

Seriously though - you're quite the investigative journalist. It's a wonder the Aspen Times or another (or any) newspaper or real news organization didn't snatch you up when you "left" the Daily News.